The
Zero Hunger Programme initiated by the Government of President Luiz Inacio Da
Silva – President Lula – in Brazil in 2003 has today become one of the
most cited examples of successful public action to reduce food and nutritional
deprivation.

Using
an absolute poverty line (one dollar a day adjusted for regional price
differences), there was a reduction in the number of poor people in Brazil by
20 million between 2003 and 2009. In terms of the poverty ratio, or proportion
of the population below the poverty line, the ratio fell from 28.1 per cent in
2003 to 15.4 per cent in 2009. While the absolute reduction was larger in urban
areas, the reduction in the poverty ratio was higher in rural areas. The
sharpest reduction in the poverty ratio was in the Northeast region of Brazil,
the poorest region of the country. By halving the poverty ratio in just six
years – a remarkable achievement – the country achieved the first of the
Millennium Development Goals ten years before the deadline.

In
terms of nutritional indicators, the proportion of malnourished children (based
on the weight-for-age criterion) fell from 10 per cent in 1995-97 to 6 per cent
in 2006-08 (and from 16.6 million to 11.7 million in absolute terms over the
same period: FAO 2007). By 2011, there was a further reduction in the prevalence
of child malnutrition (to 2 per cent) and severe malnutrition had been wiped
out (UNICEF 2012). Again, there were regional differences: malnutrition fell
rapidly in the worst-affected region. Malnutrition in the Northeast region fell
from 17.9 per cent in 1996 to 6.6 per cent in 2005. There were improvements in
adult nutrition as well, with only 2.7 per cent of adults categorised as
malnourished (Body Mass Index less than 18.5) in 2008-09, according to a
national survey conducted by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and
Statistics. By way of comparison, the incidence of child malnutrition in India
(low weight for age for children under three), according to the National Family
Health Surveys, was 46.7 per cent in 1998-99 and 45.9 per cent in 2005-06.

The
Zero Hunger Project was a proposal formulated in 2001 by the Citizenship
Institute, a think tank started in the early 1990s under the leadership of President
Lula. The Project was implemented after Lula won the election in 2002. In his inaugural
speech, President Lula said

We are
going to create appropriate conditions for all people in our country to have
three decent meals a day, every day, without having to depend on donations from
anybody…we need to eradicate hunger, extreme poverty and social exclusion (p. 9).

The
core of the Zero Hunger Project was “an appropriate combination of…structural
policies and…compensatory policies.” The need for such a combination came from
the understanding that hunger in Brazil stemmed from three main factors: the
specific pattern of growth resulting in low aggregate demand on account of high
income inequalities and unemployment; low purchasing power on account of the relation
between food prices and wages; and the exclusion of the poorest sections of
society from the market (p. 20).

Policy
measures were grouped under three broad heads: structural policies, specific
policies and local policies. Structural policies included land reform, employment
and income generation, incentives for family farming, universal social security,
and other measures such as basic health care and minimum income. Specific
compensatory policies included the food card programme, food security stocks,
food safety and quality, mother and child nutrition, school lunches, and a workers’
food programme. Some of the compensatory policies were specific to location.
These included subsidised restaurants in metropolitan regions, food banks,
incentives for urban faming in smaller cities, and credit and other incentives
for family farming in rural areas.

The
Zero Hunger Programme defined its goal as follows: “Assuring food and
nutritional security for the population of a country means providing all
citizens with access to dignified food, with sufficient regularity, quality and
quantity.” There were thus four concerns raised with respect to nutritional
security: quantity, quality, and regularity in terms of food intake and dignity
in terms of the means of access to food. The Fome Zero definition of food and
nutrition security thus went beyond the simple norm used by many countries,
that of a fixed quantity of food or total calorie intake.

The
key to the success of the Zero Hunger Programme was strong political commitment.
Ending hunger was viewed as a national issue and as a social rather than an
individual concern. Early in the new Presidency, three special bodies were
created to implement the Programme: an Extraordinary Ministry of Food Security
and Hunger, a National Food Security Council (with 18 ministers of State and 36
non-government representatives), and a special advisory body to the Presidency.
In 2010, by means of a Constitutional Amendment, the right to food was added to
the list of social rights in the Brazilian Constitution, thus providing a permanent
legal basis for interventions such as the Zero Hunger Programme.

The
Zero Hunger Programme recognised that access to food rather than insufficient
food supply was one of the main factors in the persistence of hunger. Four
types of programmes (referred to as four “axes” in the book) were introduced to
improve access: specific schemes for improving access to food for vulnerable
populations, strengthening family farming, income generation, mobilisation and
social control.

The first category included compensatory
schemes such as the Bolsa Familia (Family Grant) programme and school meal
programmes, as well as a range of local schemes such as urban kitchens and food
banks.

Bolsa Familia was established in October 2003 by
merging three existing schemes: the Food Card programme (in semi-arid regions),
the food grant programme (for low-income families), and the school grant
programme. The Bolsa Familia provided cash transfers to income-poor families
(there was a general component plus a bonus for each child and pregnant woman).
The target group comprised about 12.6 million poor (per capita income less than
USD 82 per month) and extremely poor (per capita income less than USD 41 per
month) families. This was Brazil’s largest cash transfer programme, and each
family received around USD 56 or R$ 94 a month (actual transfers ranged from 22
Real to 200 Real a month). In 2006, total outlays on Bolsa Familia amounted to
1 per cent of the federal budget and 0.4 per cent of GDP.

Cash
transfers through Bolsa Familia became a major source of income for buying food
for the beneficiary families. The assisted families were found to have an
average total expenditure of USD 118. In other words, the contribution of Bolsa
Familia was, on average, almost one-half of total family expenditure. A survey
conducted in 2007 found that 93 per cent of children in households
participating in Bolsa Familia ate three or more meals a day (Silva 2007). To
continue receiving these benefits, families had to participate in the state
health and education systems (that is, vaccinate children, attend medical
check-ups for pregnant women, ensure school attendance by children, and so on.)

The
second main scheme under this head was the National School Meal Programme,
which provided free meals to children in public day-care centres, pre-schools, and
primary and lower secondary schools. In 2009, students in upper secondary
schools and in youth and adult education programmes were included. Doubling the
expenditure on school meals allowed improvements in quality. At the same time,
attempts were made to procure food commodities from local farmers (it was
recommended that 30 per cent of funds be spent on local purchases), allow for
special foods for selected groups such as indigenous communities, and include
nutrition in the education curriculum. Another important initiative was the
Workers’ Food Programme, where companies were granted tax incentives and
waivers to provide subsidised food to workers. For semi-arid regions, a
programme was undertaken to build cisterns to tap rain water for drinking
purposes.

Unlike
India and South Asia, Brazil is highly urbanised, with around 86 per cent of
its population resident in urban areas. The Zero Hunger Programme had some
innovative ideas for urban areas, including subsidised restaurants, food banks,
food baskets for emergencies and community kitchens. Private companies were
encouraged to participate in these ventures such as by collecting food for
distribution or managing restaurants (for case studies, see Chapter 5).

The second set of programmes dealt with
family farming, and was implemented by the Ministries of Agriculture and
Agrarian Reform. While family farmers accounted for only one-fourth of the area
cultivated by agri-business, they accounted for 38 per cent of the value of production
in 2006. The share of family farmers in total domestic production of food crops
was even higher (87 per cent of cassava, 70 per cent of beans, 46 per cent of
corn). Family farmers were considered
the “main pillar of food security.”

The
two major initiatives introduced to support family farmers and raise domestic food
production were the expansion of the rural credit programme and the initiation
of a food acquisition programme. The Family Farming Food Acquisition programme
allowed farmers an opportunity to sell directly to government (Chapter 8). The
programme undertook procurement, built food security reserves and also provided
incentives for milk production and consumption. In 2007, a price guarantee
programme was begun wherein government ensured a minimum price when market
prices fell below a reference price. Credit and insurance were two important
instruments of public support to family farmers. Different terms were available
to different categories of farmers, with the lowest income-group of family
farmers receiving loans up to 100,000 Real per year at an interest rate of 2
per cent per annum.

The
evidence cited in the book indicates that the family farming support programme
was successful in raising production (about 70 per cent of domestic consumption
was met by production on family farms in 2010, up from around 60 per cent in
the late 1990s) and incomes (there was a 17 per cent increase in average
agricultural income, and a 32 per cent increase in the average household income
of family farmers between 2003 and 2009). Nevertheless, in terms of coverage,
only 70 per cent of the estimated number of family farmers had been reached by
2010.

The third set of programmes were schemes
to promote employment and income generation. Under the aegis of the Ministry of
Labour, programmes of training, technical assistance, and market advice were
initiated to encourage new entrepreneurs to emerge from among the unemployed. While the book lists the number of
projects undertaken, the impact on employment and incomes is unclear.

The fourth and last set of programmes
involved partnership with non-government organisations and citizenship
education. A variety of public campaigns were undertaken to educate and mobilise
citizens. To cite one example, 92 million primers on food and nutrition
security were distributed to the Brazilian population, focusing on low-income
families and students.

It
is worth elaborating upon the Bolsa Familia Programme, which has become (along
with the programme called Oportunidades
in Mexico) the model for new social policy recommendations based on conditional
cash transfer programmes. The World Bank and other international organisations
now recommend that conditional cash transfers be made the main instrument of
social policy in developing countries. The three key components of the World
Bank’s new recommendations are cash transfers (rather than transfers in kind,
such as through free public schooling or food rations), conditionality (linking
cash transfers to certain behavioural changes), and, critically, targeting the
transfers to a narrow section of the population. Targeting rather than
universal transfers is, of course, a means to ensure a reduction in public
spending.

The
lessons from the Brazilian experience that emerge from a careful reading of
this book – particularly for countries with a high incidence of
malnutrition, such as those in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa – are
somewhat different from the model recommended by the World Bank.

First,
while Bolsa Familia did account for the bulk of the expenditure on the Zero
Hunger Programme, it was only one component of a complex combination of over 30
complementary programmes. The biggest programmes in terms of expenditure were
Bolsa Familia, the School Meal programme, the programme for strengthening
family farming, the food acquisition programme and the cistern-building programme
(for harvesting rainwater in the semi-arid regions). To put it differently, the
family cash transfer scheme cannot be recommended in isolation as a remedy for
food insecurity, especially in countries where the malnourished population is
much larger than in Brazil.

Secondly,
unlike targeted social programmes elsewhere in the world, which are associated
with immediate and steep reductions in government expenditure, spending on the
Bolsa Familia increased three-fold between 2003 and 2008 (from USD 1.9 billion
to USD 6.1 billion). The total expenditure of the federal government
departments that undertook the various programmes doubled, and, in addition,
there was a trebling of funds for rural credit. From 2003, a significant rise
in public expenditure on social safety nets has been noted in the literature
(Barbosa-Filho 2008). Also, unlike most cash transfers, where the real value of
the subsidy is quickly eroded by inflation, using a price index based on
staples, the real value of the transfers through Bolsa Familia remained
constant over the years, despite food prices rising more rapidly than the
overall rate of inflation (estimated by Bither-Terry 2012).

Thirdly,
the target group, though defined on the basis of an accepted international
poverty line, was small in relation to the total population. From the
perspective of a large number of developing countries, including India, there
is a very obvious empirical difference between their situation and conditions
of food and nutritional deprivation in Brazil (or Mexico). To illustrate, the
proportion of children aged 5 and below with weight for age below normal was
less than 2 per cent in Mexico, 6 per cent in Brazil – and 46 per cent in
India (UNICEF 2009). The set of policies that are termed “compensatory” in the
Zero Hunger Programme and which dealt with reaching the “excluded” through
various measures, including cash transfers were dealing with avery small
proportion of the total population. In South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, however,
poverty and malnutrition persist on a mass scale.

Furthermore,
while specific schemes addressed problems of specific groups, the objective of
ensuring food security was viewed as applicable to “the population at large and
not only to the poor portion of it (p. 163).”

Lastly,
the conditions for eligibility of benefits, such as regular school attendance
or proper immunisation and pre-natal visits, were seen as means of ensuring
citizenship rights (p. 108) and detecting situations of social vulnerability.
In other words, the main purpose of the conditions was to “guide the actions of
public authorities towards ensuring rights, and not just to suspend the cash
grant if irregularities [were] spotted” (ibid.).

In general, it has been accepted that cash transfer
programmes will not succeed if there are constraints on the supply side (Handa
and Davis 2006). The fact that Brazil invested in public health and education
systems over several years is thus crucial: public expenditure on health and
education amounts to around 12 per cent of GDP as compared to 8 per cent in
India. Imposing conditionality is self-defeating in a context of low levels of education
and health infrastructure. This fact is conveniently concealed by those
recommending cash transfers in India and other countries with poor social
infrastructure.

The
biggest lacuna of this book is the absence of a discussion on fiscal policies
and specifically how resources were raised and continue to be raised for the expansion
of a wide range of food security and social security programmes. Fiscal issues are
essential for developing countries struggling with a large food insecure
population on the one hand, and the advice of neo-liberal economists to slash
subsidies and target food security on the other. How does Brazil maintain its
high public expenditure on social security? How has it successfully raised tax
revenues? The tax to GDP ratio in Brazil, at 32 per cent, is the highest in
Latin America. Was the increase in spending on social security at the cost of
other public expenditures, such as spending on infrastructure (Barbosa-Filho
2008)?

A
subject index would have helped the book, especially as there is overlap in the
chapters written by different authors.

In
much contemporary discussion on economic and social policy, the Zero Hunger
Programme has been presented merely as a narrow conditional cash transfer
scheme. The Bolsa Familia did account for a major part of the public
expenditure on the Zero Hunger Programme, but as this book shows with clarity,
the observed reduction of hunger and poverty in Brazil was on account of the
strategy as a whole. Although structural policies other than family farming,
such as land reform, minimum wages and universal social security are dealt with
sketchily in this book, it is clear that they contributed to a more equal
distribution of the benefits of economic growth. Inequality remains high; nevertheless,
the trend over the last decade has been of a significant fall in income
inequality in Brazil. Between 1998 and 2009, the Gini coefficient declined by
5.4 percentage points, from 0.59 to 0.53 (see Gasparini and Lustig 2011).

Development
economists have much to learn from this book and it can well be said to be essential
reading for all those interested in public policy and ending hunger. Given that
the authors were key participants in the design and implementation of the Zero
Hunger Programme, a companion volume on the fiscal implications of ensuring
universal food security would be very useful.

References

Barbosa-Filho,
N. H. (2008), “An Unusual Economic Arrangement: The Brazilian Economy during
the first Lula Administration,” in International Journal of Politics,
Culture and Society, 19, no 3-4, pp 193-215.